James Gosling

James Gosling (born 19 May 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language. Gosling was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for the conception and development of the architecture for the Java programming language and for contributions to window systems. Gosling attended William Aberhart High School in Calgary, Alberta. While in high school, he wrote some of the software to analyze data from the ISIS 2 satellite, working for the University of Calgary physics department. He received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Calgary and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, all in computer science. He wrote a version of Emacs called Gosling Emacs (Gosmacs) while working toward his doctorate. He built a multi-processor version of Unix for a 16-way computer system while at Carnegie Mellon University, before joining Sun Microsystems. He also developed several compilers and mail systems there. Gosling has two children, Katie and Kelsey, who are half siblings from Gosling's two marriages. Gosling was with Sun Microsystems between 1984 and 2010 (26 years). At Sun he invented an early Unix windowing system called NeWS, which became a lesser-used alternative to the still used X Window System, because Sun did not give it an open source license. He is known as the father of the Java programming language. He got the idea for the Java VM while writing a program to port software from a PERQ by translating Perq Q-Code to VAX assembler and emulating the hardware. He is generally credited with having invented the Java programming language in 1994. He created the original design of Java and implemented the language's original compiler and virtual machine. Gosling traces the origins of the approach to his early graduate student days, when he created a p-code virtual machine for the lab's DEC VAX computer, so that his professor could run programs written in UCSD Pascal.